Last December, the 1966 World Cup final was replayed on the tiny stage of BAC. In April, Nick Grosso's A Play in English, Swedish and Italian opened at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm; it's about an unnamed Scandinavian person who manages the England team and who plays away. And now here's Old Big 'Ead in the Spirit of the Man, a tribute to Brian Clough, the former Nottingham Forest manager, who, bowing to the notion that he was the best manager England never had, and easy with the idea that he might be thought to walk on water, chirped that 'OBE' must stand for 'Old Big 'Ead'.

Stephen Lowe's play contains a perfect adversarial summary of the soccer drama: it always comes down, a bitter thesp grumbles, to a few scenes in the shower, to 'three blokes waving some sodding scarf in the air' and to some grisly, slow-motion sequences from matches.

Naturally, Lowe's play isn't like this. It doesn't recreate episodes on the pitch or in the stands. It's entirely Clough-driven, as its subject would have wished. But though brimming with details of his managerial career and his private life, greeted with knowing murmurs from a Nottingham audience, it's a lot weirder than a straightforward life of Brian.

You hear about the cruciate ligament injury that ended his playing career; you hear about his battle with booze; you see him as a big swearer and a keen kisser; you get him as socialist and as boss. But the information isn't churned out in biopic chronology: it comes in bits and it's sometimes glimpsed obliquely. In Old Big 'Ead, the pageant meets postmodernism.

First, there's a tour of notable Nottingham inhabitants, slopping around in Heaven in characteristic mode: Byron swaggers under his turban, DH Lawrence coughs and smoulders, William Booth taps his tambourine. When Colin Tarrant arrives, he's immediately recognisable as the person who transformed the fortunes of a wan Nottingham Forest team: beaky, rosy-cheeked, nasal-toned, frighteningly focused, irritated at sitting on the benches.

Then there's a daffy plot involving Clough being sent to Earth to rescue a burnt-out playwright from the doldrums. And a consequent theme - of men inspiring men, as footballers, actors or agitators. Cloughie breathes life into the playwright's version of the Robin Hood legend, called In the Spirit of the Man. Tarrant plays its main actor (a bereaved homosexual), who's required to transform himself into a bluffly heterosexual (damp leaves on the tunic) Robin Hood. Dramas, outlaws and teams: all, however talented, need someone directing them, with a whistle and a purpose, is the message.

This is quite lumpily put across: are all those green hoods hopping around in the forest jokes or a super-irony? But it hits the target: the Playhouse is beamed up as a backdrop; the Forest stadium pops up, with Clough's head floating above it, about the same size as the pitch. This is that rare thing, an original piece of local theatre, an antidote to the cloning of Britain's cities.

There's something of the clone, of heritage Hibernia, about the Abbey's fixed-grin, roguishly winking production of The Shaughraun. This must have lost edge in its transfer from Dublin, where it went down a storaum.

Of course, Dion Boucicault's 1876 melodrama never was intended to be a piece of tinkling subtlety. It's a comedy of stereotypes: dastardly villain; wronged handsome hero; spirited, heaving-breasted woman. Its plot involves an escaped prisoner, a wrong accusation and romance across the Irish-English divide. The 'Shaughraun' is a clever illiterate, who pulls the strings of the action: he's both a stock Irish figure as seen by the English, all gob and gaiety, and someone who's in charge, which makes him a creature of the Irish imagination. It's a play that needs to mix its humour with some disturbance.

John McColgan, of Riverdance fame, directs with such unrelenting jollity that the excitements of the plot get sniggered away and its jokes clodhopped into the peat. Occasionally, a terrific line floats out of someone's mouth: the Shaughraun takes a 'thimbleful' of whisky just 'to take the cruelty out of the water'. Francis O'Connor's big, spoof Victorian design - fake cardboard stone walls and busy interiors - keeps turning round, as if to offer hope of change.

Every now and then, the Riverdance background pays off, as at the wake, when two women strive, with ever more elaborate coloratura flourishes, to outdo each other with their ululations and, as the secretly undead corpse wriggles in his coffin, the mourners spring into a jig. Don Wycherley is beguiling as the vagabond hero, Fiona O'Shaughnessy has a bewitching, crackling voice, but no one should have to pay £40 for flapdoodle.

A week ago, the West End seemed to be saying hello to the 21st century, but in a week it has reeled back decades. The Shaughraun has a tiny bit of 21st-century bounce. But there's only one reason for going to see The Countess: Alison Pargeter. She's a megawatt young actor. In EastEnders, she put in a memorable few episodes as the earnest cherub who became Sarah the stalker. As Effie, the wife of John Ruskin who ran off with John Everett Millais, she suggests innocence, shrewdness, determination and collapse with a tilt of her head.

But she's in the most dismal production to hit the West End this year. Gregory Murphy's play, directed by Ludovica Villar-Hauser, arrives from New York on what seems to be a rage for Pre-Raphaelite menages a trois. Last year, Peter Whelan's Earthly Paradise sent William and Jane Morris palely loitering around each other and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Now there's this dull rehearsal of Ruskin's sins, with banal purple Highland skies, Nick Moran's vapidly nervous Ruskin and Damian O'Hare's nervously grinning Millais. Pap.

Last week, Adam Guettel won a Tony for the best score for his The Light in the Piazza. Will someone at last follow the Bridwell's lead and stage the lovely bluegrass musical Floyd Collins? It has three songs better than almost anything around.